De Laatste Downer - Netflix

Editor

Eveline Kamperman researches Down's syndrome together with Sjoer Fleur,
which has the syndrome. Presenter Jos de Jager researches the future of
Downers in our country. The cause for this Syndrome to disappear is the
growing medical possibilities to detect this syndrome in advance.
Experts fear that those developments may people choose to remove that
child.

Type: Documentary

Languages: Dutch

Status: Running

Runtime: 50 minutes

Premier: 2016-03-16

De Laatste Downer - Jules Massenet - Netflix

Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet (French: [ʒyl emil fʁedeʁik masnɛ]; 12 May
1842 – 13 August 1912) was a French composer of the Romantic era best
known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most
frequently staged are Manon (1884) and Werther (1892). He also composed
oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces,
songs and other music. While still a schoolboy, Massenet was admitted to
France's principal music college, the Paris Conservatoire. There he
studied under Ambroise Thomas, whom he greatly admired. After winning
the country's top musical prize, the Prix de Rome, in 1863, he composed
prolifically in many genres, but quickly became best known for his
operas. Between 1867 and his death forty-five years later he wrote more
than forty stage works in a wide variety of styles, from opéra-comique
to grand-scale depictions of classical myths, romantic comedies, lyric
dramas, as well as oratorios, cantatas and ballets. Massenet had a good
sense of the theatre and of what would succeed with the Parisian public.
Despite some miscalculations, he produced a series of successes that
made him the leading composer of opera in France in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Like many prominent French composers of the
period, Massenet became a professor at the Conservatoire. He taught
composition there from 1878 until 1896, when he resigned after the death
of the director, Ambroise Thomas. Among his students were Gustave
Charpentier, Ernest Chausson, Reynaldo Hahn and Gabriel Pierné. By the
time of his death, Massenet was regarded by many critics as
old-fashioned and unadventurous although his two best-known operas
remained popular in France and abroad. After a few decades of neglect,
his works began to be favourably reassessed during the mid-20th century,
and many of them have since been staged and recorded. Although critics
do not rank him among the handful of outstanding operatic geniuses such
as Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, his operas are now widely accepted as
well-crafted and intelligent products of the Belle Époque.